“I never thought that going back to England, returning to all who are dear to me, and to pursuits that have insensibly grown to be part of my nature, I could have felt so much sorrow as I endured when I parted at last with the friends who had accompanied me from this city.”

So wrote Charles Dickens in 1842 about leaving New York and its people, “before whose presence even Home grew dim.”

Millions since Dickens have felt the same rapport, and, fittingly, “Home” is the title Dawn Scibilia has taken for her documentary about Gotham’s inexorable tug and tussle with the spirits of newcomers and old-timers alike. Framed through the lyrical ruminations of a budding young Irish expatriate (her collaborator, Alan Cooke), the heartfelt film intersperses luminous street scenes and cityscapes with testimonials and commentary from artists, writers, and average Joes.

“Home” screens tomorrow night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its periodic “Brooklyn Close-Up” series. Previous entries have included “Through the Fire,” Jonathan Hock’s acclaimed chronicle of Coney Island basketball phenom Sebastian Telfair, and “Big River,” a multicultural road movie through the Southwest directed by the Brooklynite Atsushi Funahashi.

With “Home,” Ms. Scibilia, a Brooklyn native, brings the series back to urban locales — which she shoots with gorgeous results. Her eye for lustrous textures and the sculptural shadows of the city’s architecture makes for a miniature city symphony. She often succeeds in uncovering new beauty in New York’s ordinary elements by avoiding the ready-made iconography of historic landmarks.

Of course, the city looms even larger than life in the hearts of its acolytes. Luminaries like Susan Sarandon and Frank McCourt, along with a token smattering of natives and locals (a restaurant worker, a Catholic priest), line up to testify to the city’s je ne sais quoi. The mix of insight and platitude here is slightly more favorable than in most talking-head roundelays. At any rate, Ms. Scibilia seems to have put everyone at such ease that the prevailing sense of calm and belonging says a lot on its own.

What comes out most eloquently is the tough-love relationship that New Yorkers feel with their hometown. The sense of building oneself from scratch, pushed and pulled by the city, goes beyond the old striver’s dream of the Frank Sinatra standard. As expressed by Messrs. McCourt and Cooke, being in New York acquires an almost spiritual dimension of constant discovery and becoming. Even a child interviewed here voices the sentiment in calling his life a “hero’s journey.”

Besides being an arena for personal growth, New York is also a great place to kvetch, and “Home” recognizes the privilege of personal complaint in a city that just keeps on trucking. As the critic Fran Lebowitz observes, everyone has his or her own New York, and there’s always someone working to take it away. In one hilarious bit, the comedian Colin Quinn maintains that the city disappeared for him when a certain brand of rubber ball from his youth was no longer sold.

For Ms. Lebowitz, the scope of the problem is a bit more vast: A once grand metropolis has degenerated into “the world’s most expensive, densely populated suburban environment in the history of the world.” Mr. Cooke’s divided feelings of belonging and displacement from Irish relatives back home provide a lyrical counterpoint to these sentiments, and he recalls a tradition of immigrant yearning that puts the complaints into perspective.

At the same time, Mr. Cooke’s voice-over risks pushing the proceedings into sentimentality, and “Home” could do with less footage of him in soulful mid-wander. Also, the film’s celebrity participants often seem disconnected with the streets they love so well (Woody Allen lamenting as “hurtful” the pushing out of the middle class is one of the film’s odder moments.)

But sometimes you do just want to believe the same as Father Pietro Colapietro, a Catholic priest in Hell’s Kitchen: The ever-growing throngs of New York may have a lot of “dirt-bags,” but perhaps that means more nice people, too —or at least more dreamers like you.